Christine Flowers: Not indebted to feminist' movement

I was raised to be grateful. If someone did me a kindness, mom made sure I’d sit down immediately and write a thank you note. It got to the point where I would tremble as the holidays approached, since this portended hours and hours of writing “I want you to know just how much I love the (fill in the blank) you gave me and I will make sure to think of you every time I use the (fill in the blank) because the (fill in the blank) was absolutely perfect!”

But this courtesy boot camp, as I liked to call it, was of infinite value as I grew up and realized that people love to be appreciated. Sometimes, it takes so little to make someone feel special. There is, however, a limit. Gratitude is only good when it’s genuine. Trying to guilt a person into feeling grateful is about as effective as forcing your daughter to date your best friend’s socially inept son and expecting the union to bear fruit and babies.

Just. Won’t. Happen.

This is exactly why the hackles rise on the back of my neck when I’m told how “grateful” I should be to the feminists who “paved the way” for me. Recently on Facebook, a man (go figure) scolded me for being an inconsiderate wretch in refusing to recognize just how much better my life was because ladies like Ellie Smeal, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Bette Friedan and Gloria Allred had waged war on my behalf.

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Never mind the fact that I hadn’t asked anyone to go into battle. Never mind that I reject pretty much everything feminists represent, including the term “feminist” (which to me sounds like something you use in the shower.) Never mind that if many of the “feminists” had their way, I wouldn’t even have exited my mother’s womb in one piece.

No, I am supposed to throw rhetorical flowers in the path of those who whined truth to power and gave me back the humanity that the patriarchy had stolen. Except, here’s the thing: Ellie didn’t take any of my tests for me. Gloria S. didn’t pay my tuition for me (and one pair of her designer aviators could have gotten me through a semester at Bryn Mawr.) Bella didn’t hand me any jobs, Betty didn’t satisfy my student loans, and Gloria A. didn’t pass the bar for me. The only one who did any of those things was me, with some major assistance from my parents and my teachers. The “feminist movement” had absolutely no impact on my life other than to provide a role model for how not to live it.

But, you will say, frothing at the mouth and feeling the bile rise in your throat, how dare I deny the important strides women have made since the days when we were forced to wear chastity belts and act as punching bags for our men?

Um, I’m not. It’s clear that the status of the female citizen has improved exponentially since our great-grandmothers were granted the franchise, at least with respect to our public and political lives. That does not mean, however, that feminists are the ones to whom we should be writing those “thank you for the (fill in the blank)” letters. So much of what women have accomplished has been done in small, personal steps and the grand banner of the movement cannot be draped over every “victory.” Women became doctors, lawyers, scientists warm body by warm body, not as a result of Title IX or the utopian rush to ratify the ERA. I grew up surrounded by strong women who may or may not have had college degrees but who had neither the “malaise” of the unfulfilled housewife popularized by ’70s writers nor the anti-male resentment I was taught to parrot by some of the evolved intellectual elders.

I can’t stand it when I see, as I did this weekend, women start playing the “girl” card. It happened with both Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Mikulski, famously “ungirly” legislators. Both the senator from California and her counterpart from Maryland went ballistic, for different reasons. Feinstein believed that she was lied to by the CIA on the whole torture issue, and Mikulski couldn’t accept that the evil Republicans had blocked the wage parity act. When some of their male colleagues made the observation that they were being emotional (not exactly a slur since the same epithet has been thrown at Antonin Scalia) it was as if they’d been turned into victims of domestic abuse.

It’s a little ridiculous for my sisters to get all hot and bothered because someone observes, justifiably, that someone else who happens to have ovaries is being emotional. When Scalia gets accused of going all “Don Corleone” at oral arguments, no one blinks. We shouldn’t blink when the ladies are the subject of colorful, albeit offensive, commentaries.

When I started expressing my views in print over a decade ago, I would regularly get letters from women who were outraged that my harsh, unforgiving voice was out there. One woman, a lawyer, actually tried to have me fired from a job because she explained to a former editor that I was doing “psychological damage” to my readers. But it wasn’t just the ladies who were up in arms. Men would also call me naïve for thinking that I owed my success to my own efforts and not to the towering sister spirits of past generations.(The fact that I referred to the group as ‘feminists and the men who want to date them’ didn’t exactly endear me to anyone, either.)

The thing is, I don’t owe anything to a “movement.” My heroines are individuals who refused to complain about being earthbound and instead, scaled mountains. Madame Curie won two Nobel Prizes before the National Organization for Women started disrupting political conventions. Clare Booth Luce became an author and ambassador decades before NARAL started brainwashing women that we were slaves to our reproductive selves.

So let’s get this straight: my voice is my own. My law degree is my own. My opinions, my triumphs and my mistakes are my own.

Thanks.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Sunday. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail.com.